Amazon Yellow Pages from your PC

A new interactive Yellow Pages site, which will be housed at the home of Amazon subsidiary A9.com, will be launched by Amazon soon, providing shoppers with the ability to see a store's neighbourhood before venturing out into a potentially rundown city street corner.

But the A9.com Yellow Pages goes beyond typical online Yellow Pages sites with the incorporation of location-specific video images. This would allow a visitor to see a restaurant listing and to be able to pan a series of images to see buildings on the left and on the right, which is part of a feature called Block View.

The site will enable users to look at the streets, "walk around", and examine parking and so forth - all from their computer screens. All of this, of course, takes a great deal of effort.